California is dangerously behind on cutting carbon emissions, but this year’s budget surplus can be a weapon in the fight to address climate change, with Governor Newsom announcing plans to spend $37 billion over the next six years on climate resilience. Here are SPUR’s suggestions for how to focus those resources on eliminating fossil fuels in buildings, securing safe and abundant water, ending car dependence, improving transit, building affordable housing where we need it and more.

With the California State Legislature back from its spring recess, key SPUR-sponsored housing legislation is making its way through the Assembly Local Government and Housing and Community Development committees. We’re supporting bills to prohibit minimum parking requirements for new buildings near transit, allow faster permitting of shelters for unhoused people, make development fees more transparent and more.

This spring, SPUR and San Francisco celebrate the culmination of an extraordinary public project that started 31 years ago: the Presidio Parkway. What began as a safety project to replace a dangerous elevated highway became a community-led process to heal a landscape torn apart by freeway building. SPUR played a critical role in bringing people together to complete this once-in-a-generation project.